People are complaining about the nice fellow that is serving up the image when the site has been slashdotted, but no one is complaining about cache servers serving up the image. Why? Aren't they just as guilty of unauthorized reproduction as he is?

As you are not using it in a commercial setting, there is nothing wrong with using the picture. If you are selling access, selling newspapers, or other items like this, you should request permission from the author. I highly doubt that the person who put up the photo would have any problem with you mirroring it as long as attribution is used. Putting the picture up on your personal site is not commercial use of the photo unless you make money off of it.

Thierry's notice says "use". "Distribution" is neither literally or legally considered synonymous with use (in north america). And yes I am a photographer, I'm sure Thierry knows the difference too. He's famous enough to know that these things spread.The only thing the parent did improper is rename the image from eclipse110104_solar_transit_33.jpg to thierry_eclipse_iss.jpg, which disrupts Thierry's ability to track its propagation, even though it is nice enough to include his name as an inherent keyword.

For the server argument, astrosurf.com/robots.txt doesn't disallow bots from crawling images. Many commercial photographer sites do.A bot can indeed be guilty of ignoring those rules, but that just means it was programmed without concern for rules.

Copyrights are unethical? They may have too long a life and be enforced in unethical ways but I am not sure how allowing somebody exclusive rights to their work for a limited period of time is unethical. Typically people who think that way have never created anything worth worrying about.

Copyright is a limitation to the right to freedom of speech, if you see any such limitations to basic rights as unethical, copyright is unethical. Personally, I don't, but it is a logically consistent position.

You could make the point that copyrights as practiced today are unethical. Effectively-endless copyrights mean that society never gets to freely use any literary or artistic work even though many of these copyrighted works freely use earlier, unprotected works. They also stack the market in favor of big corporations who can afford to license anything they want to use (and swallow any lawsuits from rights owners who don't want to give them a license). Even if copyrights are never extended again, durations close to a century are effectively eternal in some sectors like IT.

Copyrights aren't bad per se but the current implementation is most likely suboptimal for society and can be argued to be unethical on those grounds.

Taking it literally... the moon is a satellite of the Earth. So is the space station. If they are both satellites, could one not also stretch the analogy beyond normal limits, and say that they are, in fact, both "moons"?;)

From the link:
Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS), taken from the area of Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman on January 4th 2011 at 9:09 UT, during the partial solar eclipse. Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor on EM-10 mount, Canon 5D mark II. 1/5000s exposure at 100 iso.
Transit forecast calculated by www.calsky.com (many thanks to Arnold Barmettler for his help).
Transit duration: 0.86s. ISS distance to observer: 510 km. Speed in orbit: 7.8km/s (28000 km/h or 17000 mph).
The image shows three planes in space: the Sun at 150 million km, the Moon at about 400000 km and the ISS at 500 km.

His DSLR can do 4fps continuous shooting, he didn't need to be very precise (manually synchronized, earlier in the day, quartz watch - while looking at NTP info - would be enough; or mobile phone synchronized earlier in the day, while in range of cell tower)

The funny thing is you could do that in Photoshop without much problem. Not that he did - it's an incredible picture and he went to extraordinary efforts to get it but -

I would have Photoshopped the damned thing. The idea of taking a 10 inch reflector with assorted support gear on a bunch of airplanes to the middle of nowhere gives me a headache just thinking about it.

Some folks from the former East Germany sometimes ask me if the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Some admitted that they were taught so in school. Wrong shadows, flapping flag, etc.

I reply that I got up at 04:00 EST when Apollo 14 was on the Moon, and Alan Shepard knocked around some golf balls. Walter Cronkite looked liked he was grabbed out of the grave, and did not seemed amused that CBS dragged him out of bed to report on the Moon walk.

Golf balls on the Moon? Not even the wackiest Hollywood director could think that thing up.

Of course, the definitive evidence for the Moon landings is a mirror they left behind, which is used to shoot lasers at to determine the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Of course, one could argue that a Moon chick dropped her compact powder kit . . .

Technically speaking, the mirror could have been left by an unmanned probe. Of course, all the rest of the evidence points so overwhelmingly towards the Moon landing being fact and not fantasy. (The Mythbusters did an expert job at busting the various "proofs" that conspiracy theorists give.) I'd say that the biggest knock against the conspiracy is that it would have required thousands of scientists, politicians, engineers and various government officials to keep the secret for over 40 years now. Plus the others that would have been involved in the subsequent Moon landings. (We did go more than once.) When have you known that many people to keep a secret that big for that long a time?

The conversation has been decisively determine ever since NASA launched the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.) There are now super clear [nasa.gov] images of the lunar surface including the Lunar Landing Modules, human foot prints, rovers and rover tracks, and other equipment left behind. The entire history of human presence on the moon is clearly visible for anyone willing to look at the photographs of the lunar surface. Just as the flat earthers, at some point when the evidence becomes overwhelming, you just have t

You jest, but check out The top-rated comments in this article [dailymail.co.uk]. I know, I know, Daily Mail readers and science do not go well together, but seriously - the zoom in on the ISS proves that the photo is fake? The sun spots are birds? I despair, I really do...

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
Everyone you meet
All that you slight
Everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

would be a video showing the ISS zip across the sun. (slowed down please! since the transit was less than one second) Good lord that man has good timing... (but I suspect he actually took a video of it and we're seeing a still - I mean who in their right mind would chance that with a single shudder click??)

There isn't any difference between "video" and "lots of stills taken in short succession".

It's known exactly when the ISS is passing the Sun, so for making such a shot I'd start a short time before that moment and end shortly after, taking a shot every 0.2 seconds (or however fast your camera can manage - this are pretty high resolution images), and you have a couple dozen shots at least one of which should include the moment.

The dimensions for ISS are 357 feet by 167 feet. A simple search for spy satellite yields this:

"The satellite likely consists of sensitive radio receivers and an antenna generally believed to span up to 328 feet to gather electronic intelligence for the National Security Agency," Molczan told Spaceflight Now.

The Beeb had a reporter up in Sunderland yesterday morning... dunno if that's because of the weather, or it that was the best place in the UK to observe it. I seem to recall that it was overcast yesterday morning in London anyway.

I stopped after previewing the tinyurl (persistent cookie [tinyurl.com]) revealed that it was an ow.ly link. The only reason anyone would need to double-hide the URL is to keep people from knowing what they’re about to visit.

Now, if I knew how to preview an ow.ly link, curiosity probably would have led me to at least see what it led to, but I don’t. So... meh. I tried using telnet to get the response but it seems to be blocked at the firewall somewhere.